AN OVERBROAD PATENT ON asking friends for advice while shopping - This application from Turnto Network seeks to patent the idea of...Displaying, to a user who is engaged in a commercial activity on an online site, information that is associated with another user of the online site, would normally be private to the other user, relates to the commercial activity of the user, and is controlled by the site! 10 minutes of your time can help narrow US patent applications before they become patents. Follow @askpatents on twitter to help.

QUESTION - Have you seen anything that was published before 1/2/2008 that discusses:

Users asking other users for shopping advice online

If so, please submit evidence of prior art as an answer to this question. We welcome multiple answers from the same individual.

Summary: [Translated from Legalese into English] Exposing, to a user who is engaged in a commercial activity on a commercial online site, information that is associated with one user of the commercial online site, would be private to the other user, relates to the commercial activity of the first user, and is controlled by the commercial online site.

1 Answer
1

Here's the first article I found on social shopping prior to 2008: http://mashable.com/2007/08/08/social-shopping-2/ -- many of these sites would show individual names alongside a product (a) which, without such a feature, would indeed otherwise have been private (b). The idea of hooking this in via Facebook instead of just using the e-commerce site's own database seems to be the only thing unique about this patent, but even that is startlingly obvious.

The only reason everyone didn't do this on Day One of e-commerce / social networking was because it felt creepy and intrusive; not because it represented a novel invention. I'm sure there's a speech or paper written decades ago about how "in the future you'll be able to" do what this patent mentions, and more.

Indeed, the second article I found mentions this explicitly: "This may be the only way you shop for clothes in the future, by seeing what your friends and other people are wearing" http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/technology/11ecom.html?_r=0 -- Claim 1 doesn't mention the whole "ask friends for advice" thing, so I don't see how this is novel or non-obvious at all.